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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

Here's an offering I found for AMD, but have no idea if the Radeon R7 240 (Volcanic Islands) is supported in X.Org's free driver or the Proprietary FGLRX driver.

The R7/9 are currently not supported by the free driver, only by the latest version of the Catalyst/fglrx drivers. If you use a HD7000 series card you wilalso not have full support from the free drivers, yet. I use a HD6870 with the free drivers and am looking closely to their development. In the last year (after the backlash they received for deprecating somewhat new cards without delivering proper driver support) AMD has done a great amount of work on the free drivers, I mostly get 80-90% of the performance of the Catalyst drivers.

There are still some quirks, but AMD's drivers are in much better shape than a year ago, good enough for me to recommend AMD again.

AMD do support the free driver, but don't forget that a rather important portion of the code comes in the form of a firmware blob... this does make you wonder why you should prefer it over fglrx (unless you don't have the option).

Despite Nvidia's proprietary *nix driver being well supported, they did kill the open source nv driver recently and have not helped or shown interest in the development of nouveau. Then there's the whole optimus thing...

My advice? Do some research and go for something which is supported. If you want to run games, then you should prefer Nvidia and the proprietary driver, because Nvidia cards have always been better when it comes to opengl - even when running under windows.

Warning - opinion based on (limited) experience only: AMD do seem to trump Nvidia in terms of image quality. Anti-aliasing is cleaner and sharper, with nvidia hardware it's somewhat fuzzier, blurry and textures just seem more washed out over all.

Despite Nvidia's proprietary *nix driver being well supported, they did kill the open source nv driver recently and have not helped or shown interest in the development of nouveau. Then there's the whole optimus thing...

Nvidia is in the process of opening documentation to the nouveau developers. They are also actively working on enabling Optimus on Linux.

And on the downside, they have suddenly, silently, artificially limited Linux BaseMosaic to three screens, for "feature parity with Windows" and because "NVIDIA changed the basemosaic marketing specification to differentiate GeForce and Quadro cards."

I play way too many games on Linux and should feel ashamed but don't!)...so...If I were to buy a card TODAY for Steam and TF2, HL2, CS:Source, SS3:BFG etc, I'd go with the EVGA GTX 650 TI Boost 2GB or GTX 660 Ti (price drop on newegg.com!). Any mobo/cpu less than 2-3 yrs old will be adequate tp drive this GPU and you get a bit of "future proofing". Cards in the 610-640 number range are best for multimedia not gaming.

AMD/ATI? Sorry, IMHO, AMD has yet to take linux support seriously. We may gripe and quibble over Nvidia's binary blob, but it "just works."

Exactly. Nouveau is still developing, but it's being developed into a proper replacement for the xf86-video-nv driver. The NV driver was going nowhere at all. If anything it was nothing more than an over-glorified vesa driver with a proprietary extension to Nvidia hardware. Nothing more or less.

It's usefulness was nothing short of a workaround for servers needing a 2D driver for GUI interface support that the standard vesa driver often would mess up, or have hiccups with from time to time. The writing was on the wall for it for a while now that it was going to eventually need to be replaced.

Nvidia did nothing at all to stop Nouveau if you even kept track of the project. They were actually amazed someone actually could use LLVM/Clang and reverse-engineered hardware calls and API function calls to write a driver in a clean room from scratch and actually get 3D acceleration. Yeah, they did need a good butt kicking to get them to contribute to it's development, but development has happened, and Nvidia made the best choice possible and that was to support it.

And as I said, outside of Linux, there is very little support for video acceleration on non-Linux systems like Solaris and FreeBSD except for Nvidia. No other company has even been willing to support or release drivers for those systems.